The Dazzling Heights Short Book Review

The Dazzling Heights by Katherine McGee

From Goodreads: All that glitters is not gold.

New York City, 2118. Manhattan is home to a thousand-story supertower, a breathtaking marvel that touches the sky. But amid high-tech luxury and futuristic glamour, five teenagers are keeping dangerous secrets…

Leda is haunted by memories of what happened on the worst night of her life. She’ll do anything to make sure the truth stays hidden—even if it means trusting her enemy.

Watt just wants to put everything behind him…until Leda forces him to start hacking again. Will he do what it takes to be free of her for good?

When Rylin wins a scholarship to an upper-floor school, her life transforms overnight. But being there also means seeing the boy whose heart she broke, and who broke hers in return.

Avery is tormented by her love for the one person in the world she can never have. She’s desperate to be with him…no matter the cost.

And then there’s Calliope, the mysterious, bohemian beauty who arrives in New York determined to cause a stir. And she knows exactly where to begin.

But unbeknownst to them all, someone is watching their every move, someone with revenge in mind. After all, in a world of such dazzling heights, just one wrong step can mean a devastating fall.

This is going to be a pretty short book review, since I read this a while ago for Netgalley and never got round to posting it up on here. The premise of this book sounded amazing, and I had high hopes when I read the opening chapter. Unfortunately, I just didn’t get a good enough sense of the characters or the setting to actually lose myself in this book. Which is a bit sad, because I think there was some real potential there, especially when it came to characters trying to undermine and blackmail one another. I liked that they all had secrets they were determined to protect, but it seemed as though they were willing to throw away a lot of their misgivings in order to be with romantic partners, or rekindle friendships. Most of the relationships fell into a very YA trope of love triangles and things, and while I get that it was meant to be a sort of Gossip Girl of the future thing, it didn’t quite carry it off. It ended up feeling very… immature?

It was definitely the world-building I had issues with though. I liked the idea of the huge tower which incorporates everything, but I feel that the author spent a lot of time using info-dumps to explain things that weren’t important to the book, and not using them [or a more subtle technique] to explain the surroundings. As a result, I just felt a little lost, as though it could have taken place almost anywhere, and between this and the chapters which switched POV, I didn’t really find myself retaining much of the story or getting caught up in it. And maybe because this was meant to be book two, so I came into it halfway through, but I’m not really sure this was the whole reason I couldn’t get into it. An interesting read, with lots of potential, but I don’t think I’ll be picking up the sequel.

3/10 stars. I managed to make it to the end, but it was very much an uphill climb and less than half an hour after finishing it, I really can’t find much to say about Tthe Dazzling Heights.